AskMe.com Acquires Bestatlowest.com | Company Business News

Bombay: AskMe.com, Getit Infomedia Pvt. Ltd’s online search, deals and offers portal, has acquired online grocery start-up bestatlowest.com, thereby expanding its marketplace services.

With this acquisition, the e-commerce portal and its team of 25 people, including founders Ankit Jain and Amit Nigam, become part of Askme. They will work on integrating bestatlowest.com with askmegroceries.com, which will go live this year.

“The deal is valued at around $10 million,” said Manav Sethi, head of marketing and digital products at AskMe.com. Mint reported on May 6 that AskMe.com is looking to buy startups in the online grocery, analytics and payments industries.

Accelity BestAtLowest Online Services Pvt. Ltd, which runs bestatlowest.com, is a hub-and-spoke marketplace. It has partnered with retailers and supermarkets to source food and grocery items for delivery to its hub, which are then delivered to various locations. It offers same-day delivery service within 4-6 hours of consumers placing an order in Delhi and the National Capital Region. “The acquisition will give us the opportunity to grow faster and achieve pan-India reach by the end of the year,” said Jain, 32, who raised one round of funding from an angel investor last year.

This is an acqui-hire, where you acquire a company and hire its talent to expand or build a new category, said Aashish Bhinde, executive director, Avendus Capital Pvt. Ltd, adding that many e-commerce companies do this to grow faster.

In March, Godrej Nature’s Basket acquired Ekstop.com, an online grocery portal, and integrated its platform to expand its online delivery and online presence. The brand also offers same-day delivery in five cities where it operates.

Physical retail in India is expected to grow threefold from $60 billion in 2015 to $180 billion in 2020. In a February report titled Retail 2020: Retrospect, Reinvent, Rewrite, consulting firm Boston Consulting Group and lobbying group Retailers Association of India forecast e-commerce to quadruple in the same period to become a $60-70 billion market.

Meanwhile, online grocery shopping, which doesn’t even make up a percentage of CPG sales, is becoming a fast-growing segment. The internet is expected to account for a third of all CPG sales over the next five years, according to a report by consulting firm Bain and Co. and Google Inc.

In the online grocery retail space, there are niche e-tailers like bigbasket.com, localbanya.com and larger names like snapdeal.com and Amazon.com, in addition to brick-and-mortar retailers, that are trying to grab a piece of the pie. “Grocery shopping is a frequent and regular consumer need and we see that becoming a growth driver in our marketplace offering,” Sethi said, explaining that he expects grocery-related searches to account for 20-30% of all searches by the end of 2015-16.

In July, Getit Infomedia launched Askmebazaar, an e-commerce portal for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India. The company currently receives up to 600,000 orders per month with an average value of ₹ 1,000 orders a month, said Sethi, who expects that number to grow to one million orders a month by the end of July.

According to Sethi, online sales on Askmebazaar are based on computer peripherals, mobile accessories and fashion, which accounts for around 25-30% of sales, which he now expects to see grocery items take up a significant share.